Back when blogging first took off, there soon followed a host of discovery tools: blog directories, RSS directories, blog search engines. All of those have since died. However, if indie blogging is to take off again, discovering bloggers, especially new voices remains a problem.
Is it time for new indieweb blog directories?
Long term, directories won’t scale, but they are a cheap, low tech stop gap until some programmer can figure out a better solution or a better type of directory. But it seems to me that this is one niche in navigating the web that the big search engines cannot fill. There is a need.
There is the problem of trying to come up with a category taxonomy for such a directory since a large proportion of blogs are about anything and everything. It can be done but the categories need to be broad and taxonomy shallow. Even so, said directory would have to rely more on the search feature and tags than drilling down through categories.
Also, define “blog”. Lots of commercial magazine websites are really just big professional blogs. Where is the dividing line between the commercial and the non-commercial?
How would such a directory enlist discovery of new voices? (This depends a lot on the directory script.)
I’m just thinking out loud. Anybody have thoughts?
